I'm a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics in the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine. From 2005-2011 I was the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining UMD, I was at The Institute for Genomic Research, where I sequenced the genomes of many bacteria, including those used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. At TIGR I was part of the Human Genome Project and the co-founder of the influenza virus sequencing project (which is when I first learned of the anti-vaccine movement). My research group develops software for DNA sequence analysis, and our (free) software is used by scientific laboratories around the globe. I did my B.A. and M.S. at Yale University, and my Ph.D. at Harvard University, and I have published over 200 scientific papers. Follow me on Facebook or Twitter (@stevensalzberg1), or just subscribe to my alternate blog, http://genome.fieldofscience.com.

Nobel laureate joins anti-vaccination crowd at Autism One

If you’re reading this from anywhere but Chicago, you just missed the Autism One conference, which ends today. This conference, run by Jenny McCarthy and Generation Rescue, purports to tell parents “the truth” about autism.

The conference is a veritable festival of unproven claims, offering a powerful but false message of hope to parents who are desperately searching for new treatments for their children. It’s also a nexus for anti-vaccinationists, who run special seminars educating parents about how to get vaccine exemptions so that they can enroll their unvaccinated children in public schools.

A look at the presentations reveals that rather than presenting “the truth,” one speaker after another is making unsupported, unscientific claims and then offering their own special therapy. The one thing that most of these presentations have in common is that the speaker is making money from selling their so-called treatments. For example, Anat Baniel offers her self-named “Anat Baniel method” and is promoting it through ads in the conference program. Other speakers are offering special diets, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and in perhaps the most damaging treatment, Mark and David Geier’s chemical castration therapy. Mark Blaxill is there, still pushing the thoroughly disproven link between mercury and autism, and hawking his book on the topic.

The other major theme of the conference is conspiracies: how the government, big pharma, and the scientific establishment are all conspiring to hide “the truth” about autism, which the speaker will reveal to the audience. Coincidentally, many of the speakers also offer treatments, for a fee.

This year’s speakers include Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, as usual, but also a new entry: Luc Montagnier.

Jenny McCarthy has been a leader of the anti-vaccine movement for over a decade. She’s a former Playboy playmate and MTV host, with no medical qualifications whatsoever, who is convinced that vaccines caused her son’s autism. She’s been spreading her anti-vaccine message very effectively, with particular help from Oprah Winfrey and Larry King, who gave her prime television exposure countless times. Oprah even offered McCarthy her own show, until McCarthy ditched Oprah for NBC.

Oprah and Jenny talk science

Andrew Wakefield, the thoroughly discredited doctor who falsified data in order to push his false hypothesis that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine – whose medical license was revoked in the UK, and whose famous 1998 paper on autism and vaccines was retracted after it was shown to be fraudulent – claims that his talk ”offers solutions [that] will be ignored by those in power and the more dire of its predictions will result.” Too bad I missed that one.

It’s no surprise that Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, are speaking at AutismOne. Much more surprising is the presence of Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the link between the HIV virus and AIDS. What is he doing at this festival of pseudoscience?

Well, apparently Montagnier has gone off the deep end into pseudoscience himself. He claims that his new group, Chronimed, has discovered in autistic children

“DNA sequences that emit, in certain conditions, electromagnetic waves. The analysis by molecular biology techniques allows us to identify these electromagnetic waves as coming from … bacterial species.”

What the heck? In what seems to be a desperate effort to stay relevant, Montagnier is promoting wild theories with little scientific basis, and now he is taking advantage of vulnerable parents (see his appeal here) to push a therapy of long-term antibiotic treatment for autistic children.

This is truly a wacky theory. Montagnier hasn’t been able to publish this in a proper journal, for a very good reason: it’s nonsense. He claims that quantum field theory – an area of physics in which he has no qualifications – explains how electromagnetic waves emanating from DNA can explain not only autism, but also Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Montagnier makes these claims and more in a self-published paper that he posted on arXiv.

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Expect to be criticized for getting this fact wrong: Jenny McCarthy has been on the vaccine stage for less than a decade, not more than a decade.

These groups are proud to have Montagnier on their side. So what if his ideas don’t make sense? Wakefiled’s don’t. Blaxill and Olmsted are wrong. Heck, there are people promoting bleach as a treatment at AutismOne his year.

Pretty much the only requirement for acceptance at autism one is that one blames vaccines.

Thanks for this excellent summary the quack-fest that is AutismOne, and of the sad decline of Montagnier. Orac at the skeptical medicine blog Respectful Insolence identified “post-Nobel syndrome” (PNS) and in addition to Linus Pauling, Louis Ignarro, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and added Montagnier to the list in 2010.

One complaint: autistic people aren’t “diseased”. Yes, autism is a complex, difficult condition or neurological variation, but not a disease. Saying so adds to the stigma, marginalizes autistic people and enables the kind of biomedical pseudoscience and cynical opportunism hawked at AutismOne.

You are the evil vampire that spreads autism by mercury poisoning and unsafe vaccines and unsafe GM foods The Need for Certification We are all touched by the pervasive use of aborted fetal material. Almost 92% of our children have been given vaccines made using aborted fetal cell lines, which are contaminated with aborted fetal cell DNA and a retrovirus. This has happened without our knowledge or consent! By letting people know about these tainted vaccines, by working tirelessly for informed consent and full disclosure for consumers, and by working to develop alternative vaccines, Sound Choice is championing the interests of parents, grandparents, pediatricians, pharmacists, nurses, insurers, and all who are obliged to promote vaccines. Without knowing what is put into our vaccines we cannot make choices aligned with our values; and without alternative vaccines we cannot exercise our free choice as consumers. Certification By SCPI Question: What’s in the Needle? Safety & Health or Autism? The autism ZOMBIE epidemic is 1:47 in UTAH! The autism ZOMBIE epidemic is 1:49 in New Jersey! The autism ZOMBIE epidemic is 1:64 in UK! The autism ZOMBIE epidemic is 1:38 in S Korea! CDC hides VSD – uses mercury – requires 36 vaccines. CDC uses aborted fetal DNA in all vaccines ————————————————————— The autism ZOMBIE epidemic is 1:2200 in Denmark! Denmark bans mercury requires only 11 vaccines!

Yes, Yes, Yes everyone has got it wrong here, only the self proclaimed great Steven Salzberg is 100% correct about everything he throws his opinion at, “forget what thousands of parents say, the actress can’t be right, nobody is right, just me the self proclaimed great that follows this group of parents and vaccine injured children”, and degrades them with everything he’s got, and he doesn’t have much. Steven Salzberg, how great I am.

Is that all you’ve got, JJ? Insults? Do you believe that DNA can tele-transport between test tubes? What is your opinion of bleach enemas – a presenter at AutOne recommends them for children. I understand if you’d rather stay away from specifics.

Well said, even if heavily sarcastic. Yes, people are waking up to the truth now; no one can put a stop to that, regardless of what the mainstream media conglomerates would like to stuff down our throats.

Hmm…that is not what I read at all. Why would thousands of people’s anecdotal evidence ever prove anything? Why would some random actress (or any other non-science person) with no credentials possibly have a respected opinion on the matter? This is not even an issue where the scientists and the lay-people have both simply come up with hypotheses (at which point, one would still give far more credence to the scientific community); rather, this is a situation where you have vulnerable, inexperienced parents desperately searching for and subsequently making up an answer versus an enormous amount of research and scientific experiments proving their claims unfounded. Those who make false claims and are in a position of perceived leadership are to be “degraded.” The parents are to be pitied and then educated.

All one has to do is read the inserts that come with the vaccines. Any literate (and intelligent) person will quickly realize what not to put in their bodies. A strong immune system can be gained by getting proper nutrition while avoiding dangerous toxins. Vaccines, by even their own advertisements promise nothing.

It appears that the Brown Shirts are all over this with their commentary.

And they do not even attend. Some of them have tried to sneak in, record private conversations, but eventually get thrown out.

What the author, Sullivan and others are missing is the bio-medical approaches to help many children heal from physical issues such as GI, supressed immune systems, allergic food allergies. Many of these kids have major medical problems.

It’s always useful to invoke Nazis in an attempt to justify your position.

As you should know, recent research clearly shows that children with ASD routinely improve in improve; in general, those with an initial diagnosis that suggests relatively high function improve the most, and those with an initial diagnosis that suggests substantial intellectual impairment improve the least, but most kids with ASD make some progress with communication and intellectual skills (and, according to a survey of parents, many of the kids who have been diagnosed with ASD lose that diagnosis) and perhaps one in ten children actually move from the lowest-functioning to a high-functioning level. [Pediatrics. 2012 May;129(5):e1112-20]

Accordingly, since progress is likely but also episodic and sporadic no matter what you do to your child (perhaps even sprinkling an industrial chelator on his/her breakfast cereal–or injecting industrial-strength bleach into his/or her anus, as suggested by a speaker at the 2012 AutismOne) may possibly be associated with what you regard as an improvement.

Excellent.

Note, though, that randomized clinical trials trump what you happen to think works. Abusing children based on your profound misunderstanding of the scientific evidence is sad.

Why would anyone be “thrown out” of a conference for recording discussions about “cures” from people that are supposedly “helping?”

Real science invites skepticism. It is the basis of how science works. It means you have to actually be able to prove your claims by independent 3rd party testing and the ability for others to duplicate your results. This is hardly “brown shirts” but basic science.

The Nazis used Zyklon-B in the concentration camps. The new generations have turn the camps inside out and put the same toxic garbage in vaccines. It should come as no surprise that the people who talk up vaccines are the same ones advocating for massive human depopulation.